


When I Had Once Called Him In

by Chicklet_Girl



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-15
Updated: 2006-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:19:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chicklet_Girl/pseuds/Chicklet_Girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“When I had once called him in, I could not subsist without Dependence on him.” - Richard Steele</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Had Once Called Him In

**Author's Note:**

> For the atlantisbasics challenge on LiveJournal. The prompt I used was "A post _Grace Under Pressure_ discussion of trust between John and Rodney. Can be slashy." I went pretty heavy on the "can be slashy" part, I hope that's okay. Big thanks to thepouncer and akire_tya for organizing this challenge, and to Pouncer for writing placeholder fics to tide over recipients while they were waiting for people like me. Thanks, ladies!

_Self-trust is the first secret of success, the belief that if you are here the authorities of the universe put you here, and for cause, or with some task strictly appointed you in your constitution, and so long as you work at that you are well and successful.  
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. essayist, poet, philosopher. “Success,” Society and Solitude (1870)._

It isn’t that Mum and Dad are bad parents, really; it’s just that sometimes they argue so long they don’t realize that nobody’s fed him and Jeannie. Rodney learns early what it feels like when his blood sugar is dropping to dangerous levels, and even a little kid (which Rodney is not – he’s in grade two) can get an apple from the basket on the kitchen table. Dishing out applesauce for Jeannie is almost as easy. (She doesn’t like the skin, and Rodney can’t peel an apple for her because he’s forbidden to touch any knife, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. He hopes that changes soon, because he’ll be required to dissect things for class in a few years, and he’ll definitely need to use a knife for that.)

Cold cereal is next, because anyone can pour milk over corn flakes, even if putting the bag of milk in the pitcher is challenging the first time he does it. And then peanut butter sandwiches, of course. Jeannie wants pickles on hers, but even Rodney, who will eat almost anything that won’t kill him, can’t do that to peanut butter. Jeannie has to eat her pickles off the plate, and yes, Rodney _is_ the boss of her, at least until Mum comes back from storming out of the house.

By grade five, Rodney is allowed to use the microwave, so frozen dinners make their way to the table. At first, he’s rather formal and transfers the food from the divided plastic dishes to the real ones from the cupboard, but soon he just puts the tray on the placemat when the meal comes out of the microwave. Most of the time, it’s just him, anyway, because Jeannie is with friends or whatever. (It isn’t until college that he actually eats a frozen dinner without heating it, purely by sleep-deprived accident.)

In other words, Rodney has been self-reliant for quite some time before the Puddlejumper Six starts to sink toward the ocean floor in a galaxy not his own.

 _Without friendship and the openness and trust that go with it, skills are barren and knowledge may become an unguided missile.  
Frank H.T. Thomas_

John banks the Black Hawk left and up, yawing to avoid the RPGs that shot down Mitch and Dex. He asks for permission to fly toward the downed Hawk – first respectfully, then more and more desperately, until Command gives him a direct order to return to base. John takes a deep breath, and then another. Finally he turns back toward the wreck, his heart in his throat as he tries to convince himself he’s always been a rebel. Han Solo is practically his godfather.

Luckily, being sent to McMurdo doesn’t involve being encased in carbonite.

Nine months in Antarctica, and John is surprised to find he likes it. Part of being exiled is not having anyone under his command, which means he doesn’t have divided loyalties anymore – he has no men to defend against his superiors. He flies where and when they tell him to, and hauls the supplies they tell him to, and ferries the people they tell him to.

He doesn’t know what the scientists are doing out there, exactly, but most of them are okay. It takes a certain kind of person to volunteer for research work in a place this isolated and bizarre, and John respects them for following their work all the way down here. They’re dedicated to a point some might consider dangerous – but those would be people who haven’t flown a helicopter down to their friends stranded in the middle of the desert with an injured soldier.

 _Something goes wrong, I yell at them—“Fix it”—whether it’s their fault or not. You can only really yell at the players you trust.  
Bill Parcells, New York Giants coach_

John stands in the gate room for a few minutes after the medical team runs off to the infirmary with Rodney on a gurney. Rodney had been paper-white and entirely too still, though he had found a way to cock his head even though it was on the pillow. It had looked like he was listening to something no one else could hear.

When John gets to the infirmary twenty minutes later, Rodney is crashed out under a warming blanket, with an IV drip set up to his left. Carson looks up from Rodney’s chart and says, “You did a good job after you pulled him out of the jumper. The warmed oxygen sped things along while you were ascending to the surface. I take it his temperature dropped after you got him out of the water?”

“Yeah, like you told us it would,” John says, moving to stand next to Rodney’s bed. John had started the ascent while Zelenka got Rodney settled in the back, though he’d had to leave the pilot’s seat and help out when Rodney fought the oxygen mask being fitted over his mouth. John had held Rodney’s hands in his own, rubbing his thumbs over Rodney’s knuckles until Rodney subsided into even breathing and what looked like sleep, as opposed to, say, a coma.

Carson continues, “It’s only a mild case of hypothermia, so he’ll need to be here for just a few hours while we monitor his vitals, but then he’ll be able to go to his own quarters. Zelenka’s changed the climate control in there to make it warmer, so Rodney should be quite comfortable.”

“How long should he rest?”

“I’ve told Elizabeth two days of rest and some light activities, and then he can return to work. And no coffee or anything caffeinated until then, though herbal tea is all right.”

“I’ll warn the kitchen staff,” John says, and wonders if he needs to search Rodney’s quarters and hide his Kona stash.

“Aye. You should go rest for a few hours, Colonel, then you can liberate this one.”

“Sounds like a plan.” John’s just hitting the post-mission drop in adrenaline, where a pillow becomes the best thing ever invented. He hits the mess, grabs the Pegusus equivalent of a banana, and eats it while he walks to his quarters, where he takes a quick shower and falls into bed with his hair still damp. When he wakes up, it’s dark and time to pick up Rodney.

But when he gets to the infirmary, Rodney is walking out the door, wearing some blue scrubs and clutching a blanket around his shoulders. “Oh, Colonel, thank god you’re here. Would you tell Carson I’m perfectly capable of walking to my quarters under my own power?”

From the doorway, Carson says, “I was only saying you should take it easy, not trying to get you on a gurney. Also, Dr. Zelenka has confiscated the coffee he found in your room.”

Rodney’s mouth tightens, so John knows that’s what he was after. “C’mon, Rodney, we’ll skip all the way back to your quarters,” he says, slipping his arm around Rodney’s shoulder. “Just to prove you can do it.”

“Ha, ha. Walking is fine,” Rodney says, moving ahead and out from under John’s arm. He presses the button for the transporter and stands huddled in his blanket. For some reason, he’s wearing socks but no slippers, which John finds unaccountably endearing, and that can’t be the right word for Rodney, you know, _ever_ , but apparently it is the right word, for the time being.

A few minutes later, Rodney palms open the door to his quarters and – wow, Zelenka did up the temperature, but just a few degrees or so, so it feels less “rainforest” and more “cozy.” Rodney drops the blanket on the bed and looks at his desk, where there’s a bowl filled with tea leaves, probably the Athosian stuff that tastes vaguely like a combination of chamomile and cinnamon.

“They’ve got to be kidding,” Rodney grouses.

“Don’t be ungrateful. Those leaves are pretty rare, which means someone went to a lot of trouble to get them for you.”

“Thank you, Emily Post.” Rodney paces slowly around the room, looking at furniture, books, a stack of MRE’s in the corner.

“Are you okay, Rodney? You seem sort of drifty. Do you have a concussion? Carson didn’t mention one.”

Speaking distantly while he flips through a journal, Rodney says, “Sam said I had one, but Carson said it was just a bump on the head and a shallow laceration. Do you know that he glued it shut? I’m being held together by glue, like a model airplane.”

“Sam? Sam who?”

“Carter.” Off John’s confused look, he continues, “I hallucinated her? She tried to convince me to sit tight and wait to be untied from the railroad tracks? Carson didn’t tell you?”

“Um, no.” John tries to get his head around the whole thing. “You called up a vision of Dr. Carter and argued with her?”

“Of course I argued with her. She’s plenty smart, I’ll give her that, but I wasn’t just going to sit there with water coming in the seams and a giant sea monster swimming outside.”

“Uh-huh. You knew she wasn’t real, right?”

“Of course I knew she wasn’t real. I’m not mentally ill.” John thought a few of the personnel might disagree, but this wasn’t the forum to discuss it. He’d have to leave it to Kate.

“So, why did it happen?”

Rodney’s still looking through the journal. “I don’t know. I guess you could say I was of two minds about what to do – try to power up the jumper somehow and get within signal distance, or wait for you.”

“You knew we were coming?”

“Well, not for sure.”

“But you felt it. On some level, you thought it, so Sam said it to you.”

“I guess.” Rodney sets down the journal and leans against the wall. “Of course, I doubted her – myself, I mean.”

“You didn’t really believe we weren’t coming for you, did you? Did you really think I wouldn’t….”

“It did occur to the-the… _me_ part that you couldn’t do it, even though you wanted to. Because I’m sure we’re bound to run across a world where the citizens think you’re a god, but I know you’re not.”

John walks until he’s right in front of Rodney. “You know that I will always come back. You have to know that by now, or Sam wouldn’t have known.”

“Yes, yes, I get it.” John must look skeptical, because Rodney says it again: “I get it.”

Standing there, John finds himself staring at the bandage on Rodney’s head, and reaches out to trace the lower edge of it with his finger. And then, feeling reckless, he rests his hand on Rodney’s cheek and runs his thumb back and forth along the cheekbone. The silence stretches out like a filament until Rodney says, “Is this what it feels like it is?”

“What does it feel like it is?”

Rodney leans forward so slowly John realizes he’s being given a chance to back away. Instead, John leans forward until their lips meet and a slow wave of heat rolls down his back and – and then they’re _kissing_ , their arms tight around each other, and if this was a movie, there’d be violins. Rodney pulls back and murmurs, “I guess this is what it felt like.”

John mmm-hmm’s and kisses down the side of Rodney’s neck. He still smells like the infirmary, but not as strongly as before, and underneath that is salt, from sweat or the ocean, John can’t tell. “Is this, is this why—“

“I would have done that for anyone,” John whispers over Rodney’s skin.

“Oh, okay.” A few minutes later, when Rodney’s leaning against the wall and John is leaning against Rodney, Rodney says, “You know…” in that trying-for-casual way of his, “Carson said I should get some light exercise, get my blood pumping.”

“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about sex.”

“Come on! I can’t have coffee for _two days_! At the very least, I should get to have sex.”

“You’re not too tired?”

“Please. Between the jumper and the infirmary, I’ve slept for about twenty-seven hours straight –“

“—more like twelve.”

“—and I’m really not all that sleepy. Especially now that I have my hands on your ass and we’re both hard.”

John feels his eyebrows rise. “Blunt enough?”

“Did you somehow get the impression I rely on euphemisms for everyday conversation? Do you understand how _not true_ that is?”

John answers by lifting his t-shirt over his head and dropping it on the floor, then reaching out for the hem of Rodney’s scrub top. “Yeah, I guess you do get it,” he says, and holds his arms straight up so John can pull off the shirt.

It goes like that for a few minutes, boots and socks and pants, all interspersed with kisses, until they’re skin to skin and lying on Rodney’s narrow bed, everything suffused with sharp heat over softer warmth. John slides his hand up Rodney’s back, which is just damp enough to make it more of a glide, and Rodney says into John’s collarbone, “See? Exercise agrees with me sometimes.”

John huffs out a little laugh and gives in to this whole thing, a feeling he sometimes gets while flying – being borne up by something very powerful, and the blue, blue sky open all around him.


End file.
